From the archive. First published in August 2016. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2016 Facebook rolled out a system trained on tens of thousands of manually reviewed headlines to detect clickbait: headlines that withhold information to force a click, or exaggerate what the article delivers. Pages relying on them lost reach.
Where that led
This was one step in a decade long reduction of link distribution, and the trajectory is now unmistakable.
- 2016. Clickbait headlines detected and demoted.
- 2017. Links to low quality web experiences demoted, with ad heavy pages explicitly named.
- 2018. Public content from pages and publishers reduced generally.
- Today. Link posts reach roughly 0.20 percent of followers against 1.20 percent for images, and Meta’s own reporting shows the overwhelming majority of feed views contain no external link.
- December 2025. Meta began testing a limit of two link posts per month for accounts without a Meta Verified subscription.
The honest reading
The clickbait campaign had a legitimate justification and genuinely improved the feed. It also happened to move Facebook steadily towards a position where sending people off the platform is difficult organically and increasingly available as a paid feature. Both things can be true, and the second is what you need to plan around.
What to do
Stop treating a page as a traffic channel. Build attention on Facebook, convert it somewhere you control, and accept paid distribution for the link driven part of the job. Note also that the most common workaround, putting the link in the first comment, has no published measurement behind it that we could find, despite being repeated everywhere. Use it if you like, but do not build a plan on it.
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